Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch

Description

Today the Microsoft Surface team announced the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta. This toolkit includes controls, APIs, templates, documentation, and sample code for WPF on Windows Touch applications and a way for developers to prepare for the next
version of Microsoft Surface.

Luis Cabrera-Cordon from the Microsoft Surface team joined me to show us some of these controls including a building a Hello World app with ScatterView. More information including where to download the toolkit can be found at
www.Surface.com.

I agree that the tablet platform has languished for several years now, but there's hardly any way to say anything will get left behind by a
rumoured Google tablet which even if it exists is a complete unknown - Google are perfectly capable of producing a piece of crap.

Thanks Surface team we finally get our tentacular hands on win7-certified multitouch controls

Well, the first thing we notice as developers is that WPF performance is absolutely inadequate for serious graphics development.

That is old news, but somehow i was hoping Surface toolkit would bring some hard-core tweaks (like fixed fps rendering to get smooth animations and so on).Nonetheless, apps on the Surface seem smoother than in Win7.. there must be something under the hood in the os (vista) configuration.

Then, the whole Direct2D topic and early samples on Win7 touch are there to confuse us... we want performance!!

When will we get a _clear_ roadmap of how MS graphics technologies are meant to work together?(WPF,Direct2D,Direct3D,XNA...)

The Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta will work on any Windows 7 Touch PC hardware. If the driver for the specific machine is properly written, the toolkit should work on top of that machine.

@LuisCabrera:I installed Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch on VS2010 where is installed WP7 toolkit with XNA 4.0. The samples included with Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch doesn't compile because in the XNA 4.0 for WP7 is totally missing the AudioEngine classAny idea how to solve this problem ?